How Socially Responsible Are Business Students – Evidence from Slovenia?

This paper reports about research examining social responsibility of business students through students’ perception about corporate social responsibility (CSR). Study exposes the behavior and CSR theories and analyzes answers from 183 business students from Slovenia. Authors established a model, to examine students’ perception about the impact of the economic CSR - considered through the “primary concern for economic results” and “devoting resources for CSR”, to the “natural CSR” and “social CSR”. Among student the interest for the natural CSR prevailed, while the economic aspect of CSR is the least appreciated. In the considered sample, associations between CSR aspects reveal significant and negative association between the concern for economic results and the natural and social CSR. In addition, positive and significant impact of devoting resources for CSR to the natural and social CSR exists between students. Devoting resources contributes more to the concern for social than for the natural CSR. The economic CSR explains significantly more variance in the social than in the natural CSR. Findings could help improving students’ CSR behavior as future employees, but also development of education about CSR in the higher education organizations and society

Vrednotenje pomembnosti kurikularnih podrocij dejavnosti, umetnostnih zvrsti in likovnih podrocij med predsolskimi pedagoskimi delavci

This article presents preschool teachers’ and assistant teachers’ opinions on the importance of selected fields of educational work in kindergartens. The article first highlights the importance of activities expressing artistic creativity within modern curriculums. Then, it presents an empirical study that examines the preschool teachers’ and assistant teachers’ opinions on the importance of the educational fields, art genres, and visual arts fields. In research hypotheses, we presumed that preschool teachers find individual educational fields, individual art genres, and individual visual arts activities to be of different importance; consequently, education in kindergarten does not achieve the requisite holism. The study is based on the descriptive and causal-non-experimental method. We have determined that the greatest importance is attributed to movement and language, followed by nature, society, art and mathematics. Within art genres, the greatest importance is attributed to visual arts and music and the least to audio-visual activities. Within visual arts, drawing and painting are considered to be the most important and sculpting the least. These findings can support future studies and deliberation on the possible effects on practice in terms of requisitely holistically planned preschool education. (DIPF/Orig.

WORKSHOP : NEW ROLES OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE IN A KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY : Introductory provocation

Knowledge is intangible raw material from which entrepreneurs make innovations. By using it for innovation, the modern western society dominates the entire world. It is called innovative, or entrepreneurial, information, knowledge society, etc. It is full of narrow specialists, which may be very deep and risk essential oversights, too. Hence, their specialization needs completing-up with other special insights in order to enable requisite holism. (See part 1). Requisite holism receives support from systems thinking. This has been an ancient, which can belong to bases of informal systems thinking. Modern trends of life require the latter in many ways because one sees that one-sidedness is very dangerous for all of us as individuals, organizations, and humankind. (See part 2). Therefore it is a pity than centuries of growing and useful narrow specialization have caused humankind to forget scientists advocating holistic thinking over recent centuries. (See part 3). The 20th century with its two World Wars and the world wide economic crisis between them (1914-1945) demonstrated the urgent need for holism and hence for systems thinking to receive a scientific basis - systems theory - against the current overspecialization. Still, over six decades of GST and Cybernetics, the narrow specialization has won the battle over Bertalanffian holism, and made it forgotten, or limited inside single traditional fields of science and practice, mostly. (See part 4). World-wide humankind's organizations found it necessary to renew systems thinking and to do so in a rather direct link / interdependence with (1) survival of humankind by peace - United Nation and Security Council, (2) by linking economy and care for nature - Sustainable Development, and (3) quality of life and work life by linking entrepreneurship, innovation, excellent quality, learning, and systems thinking, including (4) enlarging the notion of innovation from a technological novelty to every novelty that its customers experience as a source of new benefit. Invention (= new idea) cannot become innovation without systems thinking linking many different specialists in the same endeavor run by entrepreneurial persons in teamwork. (See part 5). Though, the current systems theory is neither uniform nor united, but diversified in five major streams. All of them are beneficial in their own right, but none is the only beneficial or useful one. (See part 6). Our conclusion about the new role of systems thinking in the modern society can hence be briefed as follows (with a slight economic flavor to the notion, see Part 7).The original publication is available at JAIST Press http://www.jaist.ac.jp/library/jaist-press/index.htmlIFSR 2005 : Proceedings of the First World Congress of the International Federation for Systems Research : The New Roles of Systems Sciences For a Knowledge-based Society : Nov. 14-17, 2173, Kobe, JapanWorkshop, Session 1 : he New Roles of Systems Sciences for a Knowledge-based Societ

SOFT SYSTEMS THEORIES FROM MARIBOR, SLOVENIA, AND THEIR USE IN THE REAL WORLD

Based on Mulej's Dialectical Systems Theories and Kajzer's work on Business Cybernetics at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Economics and Business, several new systems and cybernetic theories and their applications in the real world have been created, over the forty years since the first publication about the Dialectical Systems Theory. This experience is briefed here

The 'Maribor Concept' of Systems Education: Specialization without Over-specialization

Over 40 years, we have been practicing teaching of systems thinking and behavior to students of economics and business as well as to other professions. We are briefly presenting our course syllabus, our method of teaching, and our reasons for our program. Basically, we have been facing the following situation: both the ancient and modern fight for supremacy of either narrow specialization or the holistic/systemic thinking is not over, although it makes no sense: everybody needs a double capacity: A profession, which is a narrow specialization unavoidably; and Systemic behavior/thinking, which supports co-operation of narrow specialists on their way to the equally unavoidable requisite holism of them as mixed teams